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photographer E-Yaji.

The Mary and George Bloch Collection: Part II  
Bonham's, Hong Kong, 23 November 2010: Lot 80 

Lot 80

Lot 80
Treasury 7, no. 1491

Scholar’s Rock

Coconut shell; with a flat lip and flat foot; made of two convex segments and nine further sections to form the foot, narrow sides, shoulders, neck, and lip, the latter two made of discs set horizontally; engraved on one main side with a natural stone sculpture and a pot of calamus grass, inscribed above in running script ‘Executed by Songshi in the mid-winter of the wuyin year’, and on the other in running script with a mild encomium on snuff, followed by ‘Carved by Zhifu for the correction of the honourable second elder brother Song’ou in a spring month of the jimao year’
Zhifu and Songshi, mid-winter 1878–spring 1879
Height: 5.7 cm
Mouth/lip: 0.51/1.37 cm
Stopper: tourmaline; bone collar

Lot 80 Provenance:
Robert Hall (1987)

Published:
Hall 1987, no. 7
Kleiner, Yang, and Shangraw 1994, no. 271
Treasury 7, no. 1491

Exhibited:
Hong Kong Museum of Art, March–June 1994
National Museum of Singapore, November 1994–January 1995

Lot 80 Commentary
This exceptional coconut-shell bottle, with its extremely unusual form and powerful, confident engraving, seems to represent collaboration between two artists working at least one month apart. The scholarly still-life scene was executed first, by an artist signing only with his hao Songshi (Pine and Stone), and dated to the mid-winter month of 1878. Presumably Songshi (the sobriquet is a common one) left it unfinished with nothing on the other side precisely so that he could invite a suitable collaborator to join his work of art. Once finished, it was perhaps presented to a third party as a gift, as were many of these literati snuff bottles. It is also possible that the honourable Song’ou, to whom the second artist inscribed the work, was none other than the mysterious Songshi himself—although since Song’ou is only a given name, it does not help us to identify any of the participants any further.

Coconut-shell bottles produced by the literati seem to have become most fashionable in the second half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the style of this still-life scene is typical of the inside-painted bottles popularized by Zhou Leyuan and echoed by so many other artists inspired by him in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. This was engraved before Zhou is known to have painted such scenes so frequently, but he was already painting in 1879 and may have produced such a subject in that year or the year before, even if no such bottle has survived. The subject, in any case, seems to be a part of a wider late-Qing trend in and around Beijing, where Zhou worked; the painterly combination of the still life and the brief inscription giving the date and name of the engraver was part of the same trend. In fact, if there was a question as to whether 1878/1879 is the correct date, perhaps an equally likely alternative to a date sixty years earlier would be one sixty years later (1938/1939), by which time this subject had become very well established among inside-painted artists in the north.

Regardless of the correct date, the bottle itself is among the most formally impressive of all known coconut-shell bottles, with its proper neck and lip and the two convex outer segments so carefully separated around the narrow sides, across the shoulders, and under the foot by very neatly inlaid additional segments to create an extremely elegant and unusual form for a coconut-shell bottle.

The mild encomium on snuff falls short of the full panegyric we have come to expect of such poetic endorsements of snuff and snuff bottles, but runs in the same vein. It reads, in running script of considerable confidence and with unusually exaggerated modulation for the genre

Using a gourd ladle to make this bottle,
Can we speak of drinking through the nose?

One of the many uses for coconut shells in China was as the bowl of a ladle, so the first line refers to the material and the second line asks whimsically if this means the snuffer is drinking from the ‘ladle’ through the nose.




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